AP Photo/Richard Vogel,File Marijuana plants for sale at a medical marijuana provider in Los Angeles. A ttorney General Jeff Sessions had little to celebrate on the annual marijuana holiday this week. President Donald Trump has not said much to back him up on the issue, leaving Sessions as a lone voice in the federal wilderness. He has opined that medical marijuana has been “ hyped ,” and he doubles down at every available opportunity on beefing up enforcement against the Schedule 1 drug, even though many states and localities have taken off in a completely different direction. With too many balls already in the air, administration officials are positioned to have another one conk them on their collective head. For one thing, Sessions is simply too late: A number of states have already decided the marijuana question. Any federal move to crack down on recreational users or medical marijuana patients and their suppliers users would be met with a blowback similar to, if not even more...

(Photo: Flickr/Aurelien Guichard) New York City P ittsburgh, New York, and Newark may signal rust belt chic to some, but this troika of iconic urban places were touchstones for Richard Florida, a self-proclaimed urban diagnostician. Resurrecting gritty industrial Pittsburgh by harnessing its heritage, parks, neighborhoods, and universities to a strategy of attracting a new generation of talent was the secret sauce for The Rise of the Creative Class , his bestselling work on the knowledge economy. Unhappy as an undergraduate premedical student at Rutgers University, Florida’s ah-ha moment came courtesy of an urban geography class assignment to document New York neighborhoods—the East Village, the West Village, Soho, Tribeca. Florida was entranced by a city emerging from the dismal funk of the 1970s and into its own frenetic revival paced by artists, punk rockers, and new wavers among others. He dispensed with the sweat, blood, and guts of pre-med for concrete, asphalt, and parks of...

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik Members of the Congressional Black Caucus hold their report, "We Have a Lot to Lose," after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House. T he Congressional Black Caucus leadership team did not go to the White House to talk about urban carnage or April Ryan. Instead, over the course of more than a half-hour with the 45th president of the United States, they laid out the full spectrum of issues facing Africans Americans and what he could do about them—if he wanted to get past posturing. To get Trump to focus like a laser, they reminded him of his time campaign trail speaking to adoring throngs of white people in small places with few black faces. He used to boast that Democratic candidates courted the black vote only to turn their backs on African Americans until the next election: Why not vote for him? “What do you have to lose?" he famously asked. So the CBC presented Trump with a new report , “We Have a Lot to Lose.” The CBC regularly sends an agenda...

Stockr/Shutterstock T he next big thing in American infrastructure investment is public-private partnerships. Although private companies have long played a key role in designing and constructing public projects, federal and state officials increasingly view the private sector as the dollars-and-cents answer to digging out of the rubble of failing highways, bridges, and transit. Both President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan tout them as one way to reduce the use of public monies in their as-yet-to-be-detailed infrastructure dreamscapes. Public-private partnerships may indeed provide the dollars that fearful politicians are unable to pry from the pockets of their tax-averse constituents. But P3s, as they are known in the infrastructure sector, are more complex than they appear to people who just want to get where they’re going. In a new Economic Policy Institute report, “ No Free Bridge ,” researcher Hunter Blair shows just why these partnerships are far from a “eureka” moment...